Why I won’t be showing my youth group ‘The Passion of The Christ’ this Easter

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This morning I accidently flicked toothpaste into my eye. It was stupidly painful and more than a little humiliating. That, however, was not the reason for the toothbrush or the toothpaste – I wanted to clean my teeth! The 2004 Mel Gibson film, The Passion of The Christ – in some odd way – is much like my unfortunate brush with the toothpaste. A significant emphasis on pain and humiliation that largely loses the reason behind the story.

I first watched The Passion of The Christ alone in my brother’s room when I was seventeen. I had a pretty mature Christian faith, and I was plugged into a good youth group. The initial post-movie shock lasted me about three hours. I remember guilt, fear, gratitude, and floods of tears. After that it took over my mental processing for weeks. There were just aspects of it that I couldn’t work out or square away.

On the whole, I believed it was generally a more helpful than unhelpful experience at the time. And that’s the thing – I wouldn’t say that The Passion of The Christ is a bad film, or even – on the whole – unhelpful for a lot of Christians. There are some very precious parts of the film that were handled with real grace and care. The question today, however, is whether we should show it at our youth clubs to groups of 11–18-year-olds? And linked to that question – does it honestly display what really happened to Jesus in those last days of His life?

A youth club staple?

I’m part of an online forum of youth workers who addressed this very question just last week: Should you show The Passion of The Christ at youth clubs? The debate drew very strong opinions from both sides. One person said the film was ‘manipulative and traumatizing’, to which someone else responded ‘you should try the source material sometime.’ Ouch! A parent raised concerns too, saying ‘absolutely not… I have a daughter that would be traumatized.’

Although this was just last week, it is an old debate. The argument usually goes back and forth between, yes show it, it’s important to see with accuracy the pain that Jesus went through; and no, don’t show it, it’s too violent, and it’s inappropriate for young people.

I have sympathy for both of these views. I think it is important to know how much tragic pain, violence, and humiliation the cross inflicted on Jesus, and for young people to be able fit that into their faith language. However, that should be done with 1) accuracy, 2) necessity, and 3) sensitivity as measures. Unfortunately, I think these are all found wanting in The Passion of The Christ.

Accuracy

The Passion of The Christ promotes a myth of accuracy though claiming loyalty to the Bible as its source material and historical meticulousness. There are, however, plenty of accuracy issues in The Passion of The Christ, from the clothes and beards to the languages and customs, to the off-kilter presentation of both the Jews and the Romans, to the reoccurring (and frankly creepy) anthropomorphised images of the devil. Sorry, I’ve got a soft spot for Christian mysticism, but 40 year old baby-Satan was just weird!

There are just far too many details that are inaccurate to take the film as solid history. However, it’s not just a case of ‘if you can’t get the small things right…’ There are also a few much more significant problems. For this post, I’ll focus on just one – and it’s a big one!

The film’s particular and extended image of ‘scourging’ – repeated lashes with something akin to a cat-o-nine tails embedded with pieces of bone or metal – does not come from either the Bible or historical authorities. As archaeologists Berlin and Magness comment ‘there are neither descriptions, pictorial representations, nor physical evidence for the brutal implement that is used at length and to such horrific effect in The Passion’s “scourging” scenes.’[1] In fact, the only implement the Gospels’ mention is a ‘reed’ (Matt. 27:30; Mk. 15:19), and the only example of a weapon anything like what’s displayed in the film is ‘the whip’ used by Jesus to drive people out of the temple (a ‘φραγέλλιον’ in Jn. 2:13 ). This, however, was a collection of leather chords, not a metal-encrusted torture device.

Although the image of a torture weapon with multiple chords and chains and with bone or metal hooks is widely shared in Bible studies and on the internet, in reality there is very little evidence of the Romans using anything like this in the time of Jesus. The closest thing we have from archaeology is a ceremonial instrument carried by pagan priests (which wasn’t used for torture) or a 4th Century ‘plumbate’ whip, which wasn’t around in 1st Century Palestine. It wasn’t really until the 15th or 16th Century that the Church began to speculate on this kind of torture weapon. Our understanding of the ‘cat-o-nine-tails’ scourge is, in reality, an invention of medieval art, not Roman antiquity.

In the film, however, Jesus is lashed, flogged, and scourged across several positions, with several embellished tools, around one-hundred times. If the film is correct, and Jesus was tortured in such an unprecedented and remarkable way – and one that diverges so much from Roman custom – you would have thought that one of the Gospels would have mentioned it?

Going back to the youth workers’ forum I mentioned earlier, one person said, ‘If anything [the film] doesn’t show half of what suffering our savior went through!’ and another, ‘[The] Passion of the Christ doesn’t hold a candle to what actually happened but is the closest thing to it.’ Sorry guys, I appreciate your passion, but if you’re using either the Bible or historical record, then the scourging scene was overdone, exaggerated, and largely fabricated.

This isn’t to make light of Jesus’ flogging. By no means! But it is a matter of focus. Whereas the Gospels focus on the teaching and person of Christ without overly concentrating on his physical pain, The Passion of The Christ completely reverses this emphasis. It dials up the torture to a degree that is indefensible from either historical or biblical evidence – and loses the purpose or person of Jesus behind it. There is accuracy in some of the drama presented, but much of it is heavily embellished.

Necessity

My second issue is contextual balance. Theologically, the film places so much emphasis on the physical, human-flesh suffering, that it loses the eternal battle for souls almost entirely. It’s mostly important that we know that Jesus died for us, and then it’s definitely meaningful to remember that that was an intense and unfair death. But the pain experienced is not the point! When we super-over-hyper focus on any single aspect of the gospel to this extent, we throw the perfect balance of the story out of whack, and we lose the narrative power of the whole.

If you put rocket fuel in Ford Mondeo, you’re not left with a faster, cooler car. What you actually have is a very messy explosion! Even if The Passion of The Christ was mostly an accurate depiction, the severe overemphasis on Jesus’ torture and death without any explanation or context loses the wider story of His incarnation, crucifixion, atonement, resurrection and ascension.

The most glaring issue throughout the two-hour violent depiction of Jesus’ torture and death then, is that at no point does the film address the question why? For what reason did Jesus die? If you’re going to use The Passion of The Christ as an evangelistic tool, then that’s a really significant hole. And considering the intensive emotional state that your young people are going to be in after watching it, are you going to be able to then explain what’s missing? You might get a positive-looking immediate result (“they were speechless!”), but you also might be unpicking it for years to come.

Put another way, if you’re going to justify over-emphasising  gratuitous violence for theological reasons, you’d better make sure your theology is on point. This is especially true if you’re working with vulnerable young people.

Sensitivity

Entertainment Weekly ranked The Passion of The Christ as ‘the most controversial film of all time.’ I’ve heard Christians say this is because the gospel is offensive and divisive, but that’s not the reason the magazine gave. It was ranked this highly because of its extreme depictions of torture and violence. For context, they ranked this ahead of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a film for which the phrase ‘ultra-violent’ was invented.

The question that comes to focus here then is why do you want to show it to your young people in the first place? Because of the extreme violence and gore, it’s an 18-Rated (R in America) film that has been deemed unsuitable for younger audiences. This means you would need a very good reason to show it to them. If that reason isn’t accuracy or necessity, then what do you have left? My fear is that it stylises Jesus in such a way that invokes a response – and if we were really honest, that’s why we show it.

Even in a teenage world of ‘Call of Duty’, ‘The Hunger Games’, and ‘Game of Thrones’ our responsibility to safeguard the development of our children should not be dialled down. Even if they are exposed to violence in the media, it is not an excuse for us to jump on the same bandwagon and attempt to disciple them pastorally by exaggerating the violence of our own tradition. While a wide range of gruesome violence exists in the Bible, taking in a movie laden with visual effects and featuring real actors is an entirely different experience.

Coming back to the true cross

We must teach Jesus and we must teach the cross. There is nothing more essential for us to do! But let’s begin and end with the real Jesus and draw them to the cross of the Bible. It’s there where true power is found, and a lifetime of passion is fuelled.

The cross was a violent, gruesome, humiliating, and unfair treatment of our saviour. It was an incredible amount of suffering! However, we do not need to embellish the details, bypass the facts, ignore the theology, or neglect context to tell this story. It’s important that we share the fullness of who Jesus truly is.

Good youth work doesn’t rely on easy wins. Rather than depending on these intensive (and insensitive) ‘jumpstart’ moments, let’s instead do the real work of building relationships with young people that will draw them close to Jesus with integrity, love, and longevity – rather than guilt, fear, and confusion.

It’s not a terrible film, and some of it I really value, but I won’t be showing it to my teenagers this Easter.

 

[1] A. Berlin & J. Magness (2004), Two Archaeologists Comment on The Passion of the Christ. The Archaeological Institute of America. Available at: https://www.archaeological.org/pdfs/papers/Comments_on_The_Passion.pdf

 

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A 1hr a day reading list to make 2020 a year of theology

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Did you ever wish you knew more about theology or wanted to brush up on the basics? Maybe you’ve been a youth worker for years, but you skipped training and now you feel like you’re playing catchup? If you start the year right, then you can work in some new reading habits that – with a little commitment – should help you exit 2020 with a firmer grasp on Theology, the Bible, and Youth Ministry.

There’s so much you can read, and the internet is a maze of muddled advice and opinion-heavy black holes.  The aim of this post is to cut through some of that and give you a good place to start.

This is by no means a ‘definitive’ list, but it does include a fair few books that many Bible Colleges and Seminaries have on their first year list. It’s not meant to be a final word, but a helpful dotted line to follow.

The hope is to give you a roughly 1hr a day, 5 days a week reading list that will last you the whole year (with 2-4 weeks off somewhere depending on your reading speed).

This list is made up of four areas – starting with the Bible. Beyond that I’ve added three other types of book: Classical, Theory and Practice. The books are not listed in any particular order, however there is a ‘ * ‘ against those that I think are the more essential reads.

You can buy many of these books used on Amazon, but you might find the easier thing to do is take out a Library subscription somewhere and get them to order books for you. If you’re close to a University, then finding a College Library that uses the Heritage system will be your easiest bet.

Remember to check out what’s available as Audiobooks too.

The Bible

If you want to grasp any kind of theology better, then you really do need to start with the Bible. It takes about an hour a day to read the Bible in three months, so I’m going to suggest that half your daily reading allocation for the entire year is the Bible itself – meaning you’ll read all 66 books of the Scriptures twice through in the year.

My instinct is to begin with 20 minutes in the Old Testament, and 10 minutes in the New Testament. That could be three 10-minute sittings a day. Remember too, that the whole Bible is in Audiobook form for free online.

I’d recommend the first time through that you start to read a long-hand translation that you’re familiar with (NIV, CEV, NLT, ERV, GNB, etc.) followed by a slightly more structural translation (ESV, NRSV, NET, ASV, etc.). If you find the time then I’d suggest re-reading proverbs in the MSG version at some point too.

As you go through – reference the introductory page of each biblical book in How to Read the Bible Book by Book by Gordon Fee.

Old Testament

Start with the Pentateuch (Gen. – Deut.), then the first part of the History Books (Jos. – 2 Kngs.), then read through the Psalms & Wisdom Literature (Job, Prov. Eccl. Songs.). Finally go back to the History Books (1 Chron. – Est.), before finishing with the Prophets (Is. – Mal.).

New Testament

Go through it mostly in order, however perhaps read Jn. Before Lk. So, you can read Lk. and Acts together as they were designed to be.

Classical

So much contemporary theology is built upon these stones, and they tend to say more per line than modern books do in a few pages. So, take these slow. This is the small list, but if you were limited to just a few things to read – this is where I’d start.

*Book 1 of Calvin’s Institutes (Free online)

On the Incarnation – St. Athanaisius (Free online – quick read)

The Reformed Pastor – Richard Baxter (Free online)

The Mortification of Sin – John Owen

The Bruised Reed – Richard Sibbes

Books 1-5 of On The Trinity – St. Augustine (Free online)

Books 11 and 22 of City of God – St. Augustine (Free online).

*Parts 1-2 of The Religious Affections – Jonathan Edwards (0.49p on Kindle)

The Republic – Plato (easy to listen to in 3-4hrs it at 1.25 speed on YouTube)

The Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle (6 hours at 1.25 speed on YouTube)

 

Theory

These books give you a bit more applicable insight to big questions about theology, philosophy, mission, and history.

*The Cross of Christ – John Stott

Part 1 of Systematic Theology v.1 – Katherine Sonderegger

*Knowing God – Jim Packer

*Know the Truth – Bruce Milne

Chs. 8, 10 and 11 of Doctrine – Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears

Part 3 of Doctrine of The Knowledge of God – John Frame

The Pleasures of God – John Piper

The Doctrine of God – Gerald Bray

*The Passion of Jesus Christ – John Piper (you can use this as a daily meditation for a while – or get your home group to go through it).

Listening to The Spirit In The Text – Gordon Fee

*Dig Deeper – Andrew Sach & Nigel Beynon

Holiness – J.C. Ryle

Part 2 and 3 of The Gagging of God – Don Carson

Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis

The Universe Next Door – James Sire

The Difficult Doctrine of The Love Of God – Don Carson

Think – Simon Blackburn

*Gospel and Kingdom – Graeme Goldsworthy

*Turning Points – Mark Noll

History of Theology – Bengt Hägglund

 

Practice

These are mostly youth work books, and none of them should take more than 6hrs to read. Many of these are also available through audio book.

*Death By Love – Mark Driscoll

The Wounded Healer – Henri Nouman

No Perfect People Allowed – John Burke

*Christian Youth Work – Ashton & Moon

*The Contemplative Pastor – Eugene Peterson

Apologetics to The Glory of God – John Frame

Sustainable Youth Ministry – Mark DeVries

*Rebooted: Reclaiming youth ministry for the long haul – a biblical framework – Tim Gough

Models for Youth Ministry – Steve Griffiths

*Contemplative Youth Ministry – Mark Yaconelli

Parenting Children for a life of Confidence – Rachel Turner

5 Things to Pray for Your Kids – Melissa Kruger

Trained in the Fear of God – Randy Stinson & Timothy Paul Jones

The Justice Calling – Kristen Deede Johnson & Bethany Hanke Hoang

 

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“I can’t worship to girlfriend songs” and other nonsense I heard over the Bible College dinner table

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If you want to weigh up the beating heart of a Bible College, then don’t just listen to the lectures, or chat with the carefully chosen student reps – book in for dinner! It’s over the dinner table when the students have come back from class that you really hear what the student body values.

It’s not that we should completely judge a College on the theology of its students, but we’ll spend more time with them than we do with our professors. There’s a lot of influence to be had here!

Watercooler chat

The watercooler phenomenon in Bible College happens at the dinner table. Where students can vent off their own ground-breaking epiphanies without the rigors of testing that comes from raising your hand in the lecture.

My first time at Bible College was full time and live in. I was a single student who couldn’t cook and had to eat three meals a day in the canteen. All the students were older than me and had formed more strongly held opinions on a range of areas than I had.

Some of my most memorable nonsense came from these 45-minute ad hoc student seminars. So, what did I hear?

“I can’t worship to girlfriend songs.”

So many students complained that modern worship music was too ‘romantic’, ‘emotional’, and ‘sentimental.’ Heaven forbid that we should appear passionately in love with God during the times of worship set aside for just that! ‘These are songs a teenager would sing to his girlfriend’ I remember one student saying.

One of the most potent images in the Bible is of God, the intense lover, and his bride – us! Song of songs should have you tugging at your collar like an Amish boy in Victoria’s Secret, and Ezekiel 16 is not the image of two platonic friends talking Calvinism over a game of backgammon!

“Modern youth work is just pointless entertainment-driven day-care.”

I’ve been a youth worker for nearly 15 years, and – even though I agree there is a lot of entertainment and hype in a lot of youth ministry – I’ve never, ever met a Christian youth worker who didn’t at very least want young people to meet with Jesus.

What these full-time vicar students refused to consider is that teenagers with no church background were unlikely to sit and focus on a 3hr lecture on supralapsarianism without at least a packet of doughnuts! I advocate for high-content, low-entertainment youth ministry, but even I get that we’ve got to give kids a good time!

“If I ran that church, then I’d fix it!”

There’s nothing easier than sofa commentary, back seat driving, or Monday-morning quarterbacking. Students looking on at churches in the neighbourhood, or examples used in class, can easily feel like they have both the special objective knowledge, and the hutzpah required to parachute in and fix everything.

Assuming that boldness is the same as the careful process of pastoral correction and discipline that’s set out in the Bible is much the same as assuming a doctor uses a bazooka to blow a hole in a body to move around some organs. ‘Why does the doctor take so long to cut a hole – I’ll show you how it’s done!’

“Mission theory? Pah! I’d just tell people about Jesus.”

Fine, but you’ll be speaking to an empty church.

Again, there’s sympathy to be had here – I don’t think we talk about Jesus enough in mission, and I hate the funnel model of mission. That said, people don’t just magically appear in our meetings. We have to make contact! We need to build relationships and connect with a community.

There’s a reason aliens haven’t just nipped by to ask us for an apple pie recipe yet.

“I’ll take relationships over right theology any day!”

Sigh. I still hear this a lot from experienced ministers. Good relationships are born in, measured by, supported through, and saturated by right theology. At the heart of theology (the understanding of God), is a relational God.

On the flip side, an unhealthy practice can almost always be traced back to shaky theology. Distinguishing between relationships and theology is like saying, ‘you keep your rigid heart muscle and precise circular vascular system – all I need is blood… Precious blood!’ (Probably said in an increasingly creepier voice).

I get what the speaker is trying to say. It’s more important to love someone than to make sure they have exactly the right view of immersive creedal baptism! But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

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Teenagers and Bereavement: Helping young people process loss

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The reality

Child Bereavement UK report that 70% of schools have a bereaved pupil on their role at any one time, 92% of all young people will experience a significant bereavement before they’re 16, and a parent of a dependent young person dies every 22 minutes.

This is not something that ‘might’ come up at our youth projects. It will come up. Are we ready for it when it does?

When it gets real

After being in youth ministry for just a couple of years, I remember getting a phone call at 6am from a local school in London to explain that a very popular sixteen-year-old boy had tragically lost his life in the night. He had been out with some friends, came home late, and – complicated by an undiagnosed heart problem – choked on vomit in his sleep. I was asked to attend a memorial assembly that very morning, then asked if I would stay behind afterwards to ‘counsel’ some of his friends.

I got up, donned my suit, and headed through the morning London traffic with no idea what to expect. The assembly was heart-breaking. Two thousand students, many openly weeping, a confused and unsure shell of a head teacher trying desperately to find words of comfort, and the boy’s parents, fresh from the hospital on the front row in each other’s arms. It got very real very fast.

You first bucko

When young people are hurting in our youth group, or – tragically – when one of our young people passes away, we get hurt. We too are bereaved. We too are going to feel it and need to work through stages of grief and come to terms with loss. We will feel it too.

Counsellors and missionaries have professional ‘debriefing’ sessions, where they can methodically move burdens away from themselves. After counselling, the counsellor themselves will share the stories from therapy sessions with their supervisor to relieve the weight.

We too need to make sure we are not isolated. Pastors, line-managers, mentors, and friends need to be in place to help us process hurt too. If we don’t do this, we won’t be much help to the young people themselves.

What does loss feel like to a young person?

This is really tricky because every young person is very different. Consider that a 2-5 year old might struggle more with the abstract idea of permeance or finality of death; a 5-8 year old might start processing that permeance, potentially leading to separation anxiety; a 8-12 year old may begin to grapple with their own mortality and fears linked to what if it happens to them; whereas an adolescent is more likely to ask abstract questions (futility of life, etc.), in relationships to their own experiences. Death is a huge abstract concept to process and different ages and people are going to be working through different things – and this is before the personal side of losing someone they love.

For many young people we work with, death might be a completely alien concept – so even those on the outsides of the ‘blast zone’ of personal loss might still be feeling some form of grief quite strongly.

Young people are reported to feel all kinds of emotions including numbness, sadness, fear, tiredness, anxiety, calmness, worry, weirdness, guilt, injustice, confusion and even peace. It’s important for us to remind them that they’re not broken or weird if they are feeling something other than ‘sad’.

With that in mind, young people experience loss and grief much like the rest of us, the difference however, is a developing young person is missing the context of greater life experience in order to frame those emotions.

Our job then is not to manage or steer emotions, but to provide a healthy structure so they can experience them freely and healthily in a safe and secure way.

Does it ‘get better’

This depends on a lot of things – especially closeness to the person lost, however, as a general rule of thumb, loss doesn’t just ‘go away’ but we do ‘get better’ to some degree. Reality changes, and with proper help we are able to move through and beyond, rather than just move on.

It’s interesting how many people start to feel guilty when the hurt changes shape or diminishes somewhat. It’s important for us to encourage them that it’s not disrespectful, dishonourable, or forgetting – it’s just growth and that’s healthy.

A lost person will always be part of our lives, and their absence will always feel ‘wrong’, however that feeling of loss and wrongness does move from the constant central focus so we are able to live on healthily.

Some practical thoughts

What NOT to say to a bereaved young person

Hopefully these are obvious, but let’s say them anyway:

He’s gone to a better place… (it might be true, but the question it raises is ‘so why is that place not here with me!?!’)

Everything happens for a reason… (what could possibly be the reason for…?!)

Time heals all wounds… (Actually no it doesn’t. Healing requires time, but that’s totally different)

Try not to cry… (Why the heck not? It’s an entirely sensible, apt, and healthy thing to do!)

Be strong… (So it’s weak to grieve now is it?)

Let me tell you a story about my loss… (How about you just acknowledge my hurt for a while?!)

A few more things to avoid

Focusing on yourself rather than them

Denying the seriousness of the event

Devaluating their feelings

Telling them not to think or talk about it

Making assumptions or oversimplifications

Over-reacting (from your own anxiety or fear)

Withdrawing

A few things you SHOULD say

I’m sorry for your loss

I love you

I don’t have the right words, but know that I care

I don’t know how you feel, but I’m available to help

How can I support you?

My favourite memory of your loved one it…

Saying nothing

Many people have reported that the most helpful thing during their time of loss and grief was just a present friend. Someone who just came to be with them, hung out with them, or just sat with them in silence.

The power of presence when it comes with warmth and compassion is both palatable and powerful. Don’t underestimate the power of just being with someone who is hurting.

Grief is exhausting!

It really is! Your mind, heart and body all dial up to 11 and work hard to process this new reality. Off the back of that, patterns and habits start to fall away.

With this in mind we should gently encourage young people to keep eating, drinking, sleeping, socialising (somewhat), and exercising. Even just going for ten-minute walks is important.

Going back to school

It’s important to go back to school sooner rather than later, but it does need to be managed carefully. We can work with the family to help a bereaved young person manage their return well though. This might included:

Half days

No exams / homework

Permission slips to step out of lessons for a break

Who tells the students?

What about the funeral?

It’s important to give young people the choice about whether or not they want to go. Trying to keep them from it because it might be too painful could cause resentment later but forcing them to go might mean confronting things that they didn’t feel ready for.

This choice should be made off the back of clear information. Explain exactly, bluntly, and clearly what is going to happen and why. Encourage questions without pushing and ask them if there is any way they would like to add to the service. This could be reading a prayer, laying some flowers, or picking a song.

If the loss affects you too then you should also make the choice for yourself whether to go, however It might be appropriate for you to ask the family what their expectations for you are. When I have been, I have sat at the back, payed my respects, then let people come to me if they want to, rather than swooping in as the superstar youth pastor.

In the youth club

Prepare the groundwork beforehand by talking about death in teaching topics, creating an open community, and encouraging conversation and questions.

Don’t’ taboo tradition to the point where you downplay any kind of ritual. Ritual can be immensely helpful to help young people grieve and find some sense of closure.

I once went to the school to help during the death of a pupil. I, and a couple of local counsellors and pastors, went to a temporary classroom to be available to chat. The students were also told that it was ok to write some messages or stories on the walls inside if that would help them.

Over the next couple of hours, we saw hundreds of students come through that building, almost all of whom left a message. By the afternoon every piece of wall, inside and outside, the carpet, the tables, the chairs, and the ceiling were covered (and I mean covered) by writing:

There were funny stories of times when friends had gone out and done stupid things together.

There were shared dreams and aspirations of what they wanted to be when they grew up.

There were heart-wrenching, deepest apologies – the guilt of which you cannot imagine.

Myself and the other counsellors walked around like lost sheep. We tried, very carefully, to talk to some of the young people; but that’s really not what they wanted. I shared a hug with a young lad I knew from my youth club at the time, tears lining his face. I had no idea what to say and no idea what to do.

You learn about these times in college and through books, but nothing prepared me for it. I remember tangibly thinking, God please help me take my youth ministry more seriously.

Of course, this is not youth work going wrong, this is youth work working! This is youth ministry at its most pertinent. The creativity of the school gave the young people an uncommonly valuable way of moving thorough their pain as a community. It was amazing. I was there, at best, to facilitate the safety of the activities and the tone of the room. God was obviously, however, in their midst.

This is the power of ritual. Light a candle, create a memorial book – do something tangible.

Resources

I want to plug a friend’s workbook. It’s a practical booklet that you can work through one-to-one with bereaved young people. Grab a copy here.

There are phonelines like Cruise Bereavement, Childline, and Samaritans; and websites like Hope Again, Winston’s Wish, RD4U and Youth Access. These are all helpful. However, I strongly encourage you to familiarise yourself with local groups and networks.

Finally, don’t forget the GP, who can often connect a hurting young person up with groups and therapy that we just don’t have access to.

Finally finally, pray. God is the one who understand bereavement in a way we never could, and he comes with hope and love the likes of which we could never show. Leave it with Him!

 

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Living with cancer as a volunteer youth worker

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This brave and honest anonymous post has been written by a youth work volunteer who recently was given the all clear after treatment for cancer. We hope this will be an encouragement to anyone walking through similar challenges.

 

Cancer, My Youth Group & Me.

Cancer:

In August 2016 I was diagnosed with a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma which is a type of blood cancer. It meant that I had to have lots of different treatments and medications and trips to the hospital and in turn meant that my life became very isolated, quiet, and slowed down quickly.

It was an extremely tough time full of experiences and situations that I never expected to happen to me, and I pray will never happen to anyone ever again. It wasn’t a fun time. God, however, is absolutely amazing and has a pretty awesome way of restoring hope, love and joy; and bringing the right people around you!

‘The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I praise him.’ [Psalm 28:7]

My Youth Group:

I volunteer at a youth group on Sunday nights. It’s an amazing team with fantastic young people, and it is very very special to me – for multiple reasons. How they all reacted and supported me through my cancer and recovery just astounded me and made me so very very thankful!

The Sunday after I was diagnosed I talked to the team first, and then the young people. I said that I had cancer, and that I would be going on a series of treatments and medications. This would mean that I wouldn’t be able to volunteer as much as I would like for a period of time, but that when I was better that I would come back. They were all so amazing about it – and I was fully aware that they were all praying for me. This was a huge comfort!

I kept them updated throughout my treatment and was hugely comforted and held-up by their messages back.

Me:

I am 100% fine and healthy now, and I’m back at youth club and I love it!

One of my favourite teaching series that we did a while back was called ‘what makes us tick’ where each volunteer was given a session to speak about anything they were passionate about.

Part of my talk in this series was telling the whole group how their prayer and my prayer was answered at a pretty critical part of my treatment, and how ridiculously grateful I was for all their love and support! Their prayer meant that I only had to do four months of chemotherapy instead of six, which was amazing!

What I’ve learned…

Life is an adventure. Which means it can be both wondrous and fun and exciting as well as bleak and tough and exhausting. What’s amazing though is that we don’t have to do it alone. We have God but we also have people. If you’re a leader going through a tough time, then trust the people around you. Let them help. If you’re a team with a leader going through a tough time, be there for them. Encourage them and support them. Check in on them. It often means the world that people care enough to remember and send a message to just say ‘hi, hope you’re ok, we’re here and we’re praying’.

 

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Is preaching the most effective method to teach teenagers?

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Most of what I remember of my youth pastor from being a teenager his him giving talks. He and his small team would take it in turns to deliver the message each Sunday night. Some of these we would look forward to more than others because they would be funny or moving or poignant. Others, however, would just be boring or self-serving – thirty minutes to just get through before music and games.

The concept, however, was clear: teaching and authority is delivered from the front of the room.

Today I’m in a similar position. I deliver talks to my young people. I also give assemblies in schools, and a lot of my projects have that upfront teaching aspect to them. I have however, dialled back on upfront speaking as my main teaching style, and I’ve embraced more conversation, mentoring, group discussion, active service, briefing and briefing, Q&A, and try-and-see methods.

I’m going to briefly discuss some of the reasons I have come to that decision.

The de facto approach

I recently read a poll on a youth ministry Facebook page comparing the most effective methods of teaching teenagers. Of the 100+ full-time youth pastors that responded, well over half said that up front preaching is still the most effective method of teaching young people today. I was pretty surprised.

In the comments I suggested that the reason we think it is the most effective is that it tends to be the teaching method that we’re best at delivering, and the one we have the most experience with. We might be, therefore, measuring it’s effectiveness by how good we are at it, rather than how much our young people retain and apply.

Like me, many youth pastors grew up watching their own youth pastors preach and speak from the front. They possibly even graduated into volunteer youth ministry by doing some talks. At Bible College they started to learn how to public speak better, and they began finding their favourite YouTube preachers. Upfront speaking is what we know.

This de facto approach is highly practical, in that we don’t have to respond to the unknown and the spontaneous. It’s constructive, in that we can plan it meticulously and feed it into the context of teaching throughout a term. It’s safe, in that it is tidy and keeps surprises to a minimum. It’s also ego-stroking, in that it gives us the opportunity to make teenagers like us.

Does it work?

This might be the $1 million question. We can probably all think back to talks that had a big impact on our Christian walks. We can remember talks when great swaths of young people stood up to follow Jesus at the end. This might be why talks are still the main – if not the only – teaching method used at youth events and conferences.

But here’s another question: How many talks can you actually remember?

By remember I mean can you piece together the main point of a talk with all the moving parts it took to get there? Can you remember the three points and the applications? Can you remember the unpacked exegesis and the contexts they sat in? How many talks can you remember like that from probably the hundreds, if not thousands, that you have heard? What’s your retention and application percentage? Does that ratio feel like good stewardship?

If you’re a note taker then retention and application might be easier, or – if like me – you tend to plagarise other speakers anecdotes, then you might remember more – but even then some work has to be done in other teaching/learning styles before you get there.

American educational theorist, Edgar Dale, famously published what’s called the Cone of Learning, where he placed retention percentages alongside different learning methods.

Dale said, for instance, that the best way to learn something is actually to teach it to others, and if we can’t do that then we should emphasise discussion and practice over simply reading and listening. What was most shocking, however, was he said that the ‘lecture style’ or upfront speaking was by far the least effective method of teaching. He said humans tend to only retain 5% of a talk 24 hours later.

Dale’s ideas are certainly not watertight, and educational theory has come a long way since. But even if it’s just half true, we need to consider how effective our upfront speaking-heavy teaching methods truly are.

Is it biblical?

Now this is interesting because at first glance public speaking seems to be the main teaching method in the Bible. However, a deeper examination will reveal that this is just not correct.

The Patriarchs, Judges and Kings sometimes spoke to large groups, but more often we see them speaking to individuals or other leaders. Prophets spoke to crowds sometimes, but more often spoke to rulers, councils or individuals. There are other times when Kings and Prophets spoke to the whole nation of Israel, however, this tended to be to lead them in worship or prayer rather than teaching.

Some version of upfront speaking happened in smaller circumstances, like the head of a household telling an ancient story to his family, but that happened over a worship feast that they all joined in as part of the ritual.

In the New Testament Jesus is frequently mis-described as a crowd teacher and preacher. But this is actually a very rare occurrence. He does speak in the synagogues, but when He does this from the front it is almost exclusively limited to the reading of the Torah (with a cheeky sentence of personal commentary thrown in), and when in the outer courts, He tends to be answering questions and discussing with small groups of people in turn (like most Rabbis would).

Even classics like the Sermon on the Mount, or the Sermon on a Plain were focused times of teaching the disciples with a crowd ‘listening in’ rather than taught directly. In fact, almost all of Jesus’ recorded teaching happens in small groups and with individuals. The biblical Jesus is just not a crowd teacher or public speaker.

The book of Acts is probably the most interesting because proclamation was almost exclusively reserved for groups of unbelievers, whereas teaching through conversation and discussion were most commonly practiced with groups of already confessing believers. This is clearer in the Greek, but still we do this backwards don’t we?

Proclamation and preaching are certainly biblical practices, but they are by no means the exclusive, de facto, most effective, or even most usual method of teaching employed throughout the Scriptures. Upfront speaking was mostly reserved for the pubic reading of scripture or the corporate leading of worship.

Preaching as we know it today is largely a remnant of Christendom, rescued somewhat by the Reformation, helped along by the Edwardian era, but stunted by the Victorian Church, and then intellectualised by the Enlightenment. We need to look deeper and further to teach better.

So what else is there?

Allowing the Bible to speak with room for the Holy Spirit to interpret and apply should be the most important aspect of our teaching. The Bible historically been a conversant book, one read in community not just alone in isolation.

I favour facilitated Bible discussion, where a leader knows the passage well and has maturity to teach, but the content is discussed and then applied by the wider group. Truth is facilitated, and the discovery of the ‘true path’ is led by figures with the experience of mountain guides. They don’t do the hiking for them!

Having an experienced, mature, and trained pastor figure in the room safeguards against discussions dissolving into relativistic chaos, and they draws threads together helpfully without superimposing an unnecessary or tightly constricting agenda upon God’s Word in the gathering. This also keeps teacher-accountability on the table with the Bible.

This approach also opens up the importance of student participation in teaching, of mentoring, actual practice, abstract thinking, conversation, Q&A, try-and-see, briefing and debriefing, and open-ended discussion.

Proclamation is great! Public speaking is one of the key parts of my vocation and one of the things I’m best at. This does not mean, however, that it is the only, or even the best way that God can use me, or that speaking is the most effective way of teaching the people that God has put under my care.

We need to widen the net, broaden our skills, and embrace a bigger field of teaching methods, and we can do this without losing our biblical compass. The plans, character, heart, and purposes of God in our communities is big enough to warrant stepping out of our teaching-style comfort zones. Let’s get on it!

 

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Responding to The Game of Thrones Debate

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Game of Thrones. Is it the gloves off, gruesome, grim and gristly opiate for the masses – or the fantastical story that grapples with the true complexities of human experience? Is it right for a Christian to watch it for entertainment, or perhaps missional research – or should they steer clear of it all-together?

Could this be a random cracking of the whip? Like Sabrina prompted last year, Deadpool three years ago, or Harry Potter ten plus years ago? It’s topics like these which become convergence points of fixation from both the heavy-grace (everything is permissible!) and heavy-law (not everything is beneficial!) extremes of the evangelical wings.

These debates create new heroes and villains, they scratch some deep itches, and they rehash the prohibition controversies from our protestant histories. They can also be quite sad.

We do love a good ‘what should we eat, drink, wear, watch, play, read, listen-to’ dispute, don’t we? I wonder if we would just get bored without them – what would we do without a pointy wedge issue on what we should consume? Paul said, ‘do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink’ (Col. 2:16), and Jesus said, ‘do not be anxious… is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?’ (Mt. 6:25). It’s almost as if they knew, go figure.

Without these debates, we might have to actually talk about Jesus more directly, which oddly makes us squirm just a little more than is entirely decent.

The gauntlet

A few weeks ago, British Youth for Christ National Director Neil O’Boyle wrote a post on relativism and our media consumption titled ‘why youth workers shouldn’t be watching Game of Thrones’ (GoT). The big take away was to respect the enormous amount of responsibility that comes when leading young people. It’s all too easy for them to take our actions as their permissions.

That’s a hard-hitting challenge that needs to be grappled with at every level of leadership. That’s the responsibility that any parent or leading adult has for the development of young people. Neil said:

‘I’m sure by now I have jarred you. I didn’t mean to. I guess all I’m asking as influencers and culture setters is: Are we inconsistent? And are our inconsistencies unhelpful to a younger person’s walk with Jesus?’

Even if we’re someone who likes to binge-watch Baywatch while chain-smoking – tell me we heard that? We want to fiercely pursue holiness and invite young people to join us on that journey, even if it means giving up something that we like. What Christian among us really wants to challenge this idea – isn’t sacrifice and humility at the very centre of our faith after all?

Cards on the table – I know Neil. I’m one of the 50-80 youth workers he mentioned in that article that benefits directly from his rich experience and considered example. Full disclosure: I think Neil is a ledge.

Sure, Neil’s article didn’t solidly settle in too many places. It was, after all, a gentle challenge on a hugely sticky topic. I’m suspicious that the title was actually an editorial addition, rather than Neil’s original? (Correct me if I’m wrong, Emily!). I think this is really unfortunate as that title colours the whole post, and it changes the way it reads – especially if you already have a strong opinion on the show.

The reaction

In response, Youth and Student Pastor, Alan Gault essentially wrote what is known in journalism as ‘a takedown piece’ in order to counter Neil’s view. It was a little blunt. If all I had got to go on was the tone of the two pieces, then I’d warm to Neil’s and recoil from Alan’s. The real issue though is that Alan’s article didn’t grapple with that central gut-hitting challenge from Neil about our inconsistency.

Instead, Alan reached around Neil, and clung to the title ‘why a Christian shouldn’t…’ Alan said, ‘I find the majority of reasons given by Neil to have their own problems and I find his blanket ban unnecessary.’ Which reasons and what ban? Other than the title, GoT is only mentioned once in Neil’s article, and just as an example of a much wider issue.

Alan battled a monstrous, legislative ‘They’, and caricatured Neil (as representing this force) as putting down a ‘blanket ban’ rather than carefully considering what he really wrote.

Relativism is a cultural phenomenon which goes far beyond simple moral subjectivity. Neil was calling us to consider our example to those we lead in the middle of such a vulnerable and uncertain culture. This wasn’t legislative, it was, however, a deliberate challenge.

I believe that Alan wrote a reaction to a strawman, rather than a response to an idea. It may have galvanised the GoT-loving side of the fence, and rattled those who abstain, but I don’t think it promoted any real dialogue outside the respective echo chambers.

As Christians we need to talk and listen to each other with generosity. Without this there’s no edification or building one another up in Christ happening at all. Before we get to the content then, let’s start with respecting that we’ll know each other in heaven, and disagreements should come with brotherly affection.

The thing behind the thing

What’s a shame about this is that I think Alan was on to something. Once you concede he wasn’t really responding to Neil, there were some real nuggets of gold in his post.

Alan was trying to make us think about grace. We can’t legislate people into the Kingdom, nor can we set strict universal boundaries over our growth – especially when triggers may be very different for different people. Alan reminded us about the wildly varied contexts that are involved in individual walks, the complexities of messy lives, and the primacy of the promptings of the Holy Spirit in the changing of those lives. He encouraged us to think upon the Jesus who hung out with the dregs of society. Fab! This too deserves to be grappled with, and I imagine Neil would heartily nod along with all of these things.

If Alan focused on these pieces and wrote that post convincingly, I think it might have added to the conversation here – and iron would have had a chance to sharpen iron. He didn’t, however, and it hasn’t.

What was the problem?

For me, the main issue is I think Alan’s post accidentally cheapened the Bible in favour of entertainment. I’m sure he’d be horrified that I thought that but let me explain.

Alan identified passages in the Bible that contain explicit and graphic sex and violence. He said we shouldn’t, therefore, use sex and violence alone as a reason not to watch similar content in GoT. Some of these passages were implied rather than graphic (Noah and his son from Gen. 9:18-27), and others were metaphoric rather than explicit (Song of Songs throughout). None of them were qualified or discussed and all of them needed to be given in context.

If I was marking Alan’s post as an undergrad theology paper (which it wasn’t), then I would push him quite hard on proof-texting. He selected a group of somewhat random passages that contain what he said was gratuitous sex and violence and then presented them together with false cohesion.

Ek. 23:20, for instance, needs to be read in light of Ek. 14-23: The storyline is the adulterous woman (Israel) and the lover (God) against adulterous lovers (other nations), the issue being idolatry and worship (23:49). Song of Solomon is a dramatic and intimate exploration of the love of God and the worship of His people. The Conquering of Canaan sits in a context of God’s promises to Moses and Abraham, against idol-worshipping pagan nations. The David and Bathsheba story needs to be approached in tension with Ps. 51 and 2 Sam. 12. All of these passages need to be read while keeping the Bible’s full perspective of heaven and redemption in mind. This is the unique worldview of the Bible lived out in the person of Jesus who we aspire to in all our choices today. This is not the general worldview of TV.

You can’t, therefore, just pluck stories out of the Bible for containing similar ideas, ignore the original contexts, group them together indiscriminately, and then present them as a whole to justify today’s consumption choices. That’s hermeneutically naughty! *Slaps wrist.*

Then there’s the logical issue with the argument.

Even if we grant the premise (the Bible is full of [unqualified] stories of gratuitous sex and violence), the conclusion doesn’t then follow.

I once had a young person use exactly this same argument including some of the very same Bible references to explain why it was ok for him to watch pornography. This is unfortunately what happens when you draw too straight a line between two very different things like the Bible and TV. Philosophers call this the fallacy of false equivalence.

For the argument to work as presented, we would need to assume that reading and viewing are the same thing and that both would affect people in the same way. We would need to assume the acts of sex and violence are treated in the same way in both the Bible and GoT and then assume that Paul’s call to purity (Eph. 5:3) along with Jesus’ call to holiness (Mt. 5:28) doesn’t directly apply to those racy and brutal Bible stories. Putting that another way, we would need to isolate those verses from the wider voice of the Bible. We would probably need to assume that there’s no real distinction between art and history as well. Mostly though, I think we would need to assume that both the Bible and GoT were made by the same type of creator with the same kind of purpose.

The issue here is not elevating GoT to the same place as the Bible, but rather depreciating the Bible to be comparable with GoT. This is the Word of God – it’s not just another piece of media. They are simply not comparable.

Sex and violence in the Bible are not enough to warrant viewing sex and violence for entertainment today.

Isn’t everything permissible?

Alan misquoted 1 Cor. 6 as saying ‘everything is permissible, but not everything is helpful.’ We can’t get at him too much, however, because almost everyone misquotes Paul here! What’s missing is the quote marks, but oh boy do they make a difference.

Paul is playing devil’s advocate by slightly sarcastically pseudo-quoting his Corinthian reader saying ‘hey, but I’m saved by grace, so I can do whatev, right? Who are you to tell me no?’

The examples Paul gives for this are cheating someone (v.7, 10), wrongdoing (9), sexual immorality and promiscuity (9, 18-20), stealing, getting drunk, and mocking (10). Because of these things church members were taking legal action against each other (1-6) and the terrible result was increasing division (vv.1-6, 7, 14-16).

On one side of the division there was a misapplication of grace and on the other a misapplication of law. Paul was directly addressing the issues on the first side in the beginning of his pseudo-quote, ‘everything is permissible’. It might just as well read, ‘Hey, I can steal, get drunk, and mock people, right? Who are you to tell me no?’

Alan said ‘is watching Game of Thrones permissible? Yes! Is it helpful? That is for you to figure out’. Is that a legitimate way of using this passage? Only as much as saying something like ‘is murder permissible? Yes! Is it helpful?’ A murderer isn’t barred from the Kingdom of God, but that doesn’t mean crack on.

Using a devil’s advocate quote of Paul as a propositional way for us to measure our consumption choices is altogether the opposite of what Paul was trying to do.

Yes, it’s about grace, but it’s about holiness too. The word ‘helpful’ here (συμφέρει) is exactly the same word used by Jesus in Matt. 5:29 when he tells us that it’s better (more helpful) to pluck out our eyes and cut off our hands if they could possibly cause us to sin. Thinking about Neil’s original post, it’s also the same word used in Matt. 18:6, when Jesus said it would be better (more helpful) for us to be drowned than cause a ‘little one’ to sin.

And there’s the point. What standard do we set for holiness, and what things will we sacrifice for it? Is it permissible? Sure – in the broadest possible way in that it won’t block the gate to heaven. But does it ultimately bring glory to God, unity to His church, and provide a consistent standard to His children? Do our actions – including what we watch on TV – bring the waveforms of our hearts more in line with God’s, or do they clash? Do our habits resonate with or detract from the strength and clarity of our full-throated pursuit of worship? This is the truer reading of 1 Cor. 6.

So…. can a Christian watch GoT?

I wouldn’t and I don’t. I know my issues and my temptations and by spending two minutes on IMDB Parent’s Guide I decided that it wouldn’t be good for me. I love fantastical fiction, but I decided to take a pass on this. My wife, however, is a whole other person and – although she doesn’t watch it either – her own set of triggers and values would be different to mine and these would inform her differently too. I don’t want to be overly prescriptive, therefore, although I would take some convincing that watching GoT would be actively helpful for a Christian’s walk with God. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone legally too young to watch it, which would be most of my young people.

I don’t imagine it’s an easy watch for a Christian, or a helpful watch for pursuing purity, although I concede it’s probably entertaining and interesting. I think it’s always worth asking the question: can I worship God with this? I think, in fact, that there are a few much better questions to ask than ‘should you’? (You can read an old article of mine on ChurchLeaders about this here), and we could converse together over this and other topics much better than we do.

As British Telecom famously said: It’s good to talk.

 

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So you’re a bold speaking warrior for truth eh?

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Tribalism is synonymous with Western Church culture. Since the early schisms, through to the modern-day denominations and networks, believers ‘of every stripe’ rally to Paul, Peter, or Apollos (1 Cor. 1:12).

I remember being a teenager, sat with my vicar in his house trying to convince him to write a reference for me to go to an American seminary. He eventually did, but not until he treated me to a detailed list of all the peripheral things that he didn’t like about the seminary – and American churches in general. None of his problems were linked to Jesus, the nature of God, or to the Gospel, but he talked like I was walking blindly into a den of vipers.

At Youth for Christ in North Wales, we make a real effort to walk with any church who will walk with us. Our contentions are that they must love Jesus and must love young people. If there is something that has a significant impact upon the Gospel, then we’ll graciously go our separate ways. There is an enormous plethora of church styles in North Wales, and many small disagreements – but they’re still filled with good people seeking Jesus.

Finding identity in who we’re against

I recently heard a joke about an industrious Christian stranded on a desert island. He built a hospital, a school, a post-office, and two churches. When rescuers found him, they asked about the two churches and he answered very seriously, pointing, “that’s the church I go to, and that’s the church I don’t go to.”

It’s almost like we cannot be who we are without finding that in the relief of who we’re not.

If we spent one tenth of the time talking about Jesus than we do about our niggling differences, then I bet we could kiss evangelistic training goodbye!

At some point we made the theology yardstick as narrow as the narrow gates of salvation (Matt. 7:13-14) – as if we somehow could work out someone else’s salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). Somewhere we decided that judgment, protection, righteous anger, and conviction should all be whacked together, indiscriminately, to mean an aggressive micro-management of doctrine. I simply cannot get over the mean-spirited Christian meme culture surrounding this.

I totally believe in Gospel surety, in clear teaching, and in exposing false teachers as dangerous to the children of God, but the Bible spells out exact how to do that, and more importantly the heart in which that should be done. (Check out this post for more on that).

Theological Surety and Bold Correction

‘Calling people out’ has never been easier with the internet being what it is. It has moved a long way from what was supposed to be a careful and loving process of church discipline. It was designed to be surrounded by gracious conversation in a sequential course of community sanctification.

I’m afraid that you’re not a plain-speaking, bold-truth-talking, patriarchal hero if you just cavalierly mash together theological clarity and bold correction – however testosterone saturated it makes you feel (#godcomplex). Iron cannot sharpen iron if one of you is carrying a machine gun!

We must learn to strive, brick-by-brick, mile-by-mile, word-by-word, and yes, doctrine-by-doctrine to learn more about who God is and how we can worship Him holistically and as a community. Worship of God should always be our motivating force.

What does your doctrine do?

That’s what proper doctrine is right? It’s not just a legislative road map, it’s a living and active set of tools to help us fall more in love with the living God. Sorry, did you think there was going to be an exam before you got to the pearly gates? Did you remember to bring your well-sharpened No2 pencil?

Does your doctrine call you to love and worship God more – or does it place you higher on your own throne?

Do your corrections of others come from a place of longing that God would get more heartfelt worship through people – or that you would be recognised as an authority?

Do you think that what God really needs is a ‘night watchman’, walking around with a flashlight and body-armour, making sure no pesky doctrinal discrepancies sneak through the cracks and into the Kingdom?

The church will keep sinking until we put down our swords and pull together.

 

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Are we supposed to ‘feel’ loved to ‘be’ loved?

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In 1970, a film adaptation of Erich Segal’s novel ‘Love Story’ made famous the line ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’, but it took another 34 years and an 8-year-old called Lisa Simpson to point out ‘No it doesn’t! This movie is drivel!’ Little legend Lisa.

Can you think of anything more manipulative than the classic cliché, ‘if you really loved me then you would…’? It’s the catchphrase of the abuser, the passive-aggressive turn of the knife, and the ultimate hammer blow of peer-pressure.

That little line alone has probably caused more regret and relational ruin than the entire collected works of J.D. Salinger and August Strindberg combined!

But have we made the philosophy behind this idea acceptable? Do we also judge (and sometimes flat out reject) the very existence of someone’s genuine love by our own emotive litmus tests.

If a tree falls in the woods

There is a growing trend that says perception is reality. Love, therefore, gets held to ransom by the loved. It’s measured in the eye of the beholder.

Imagine for a second that we decided that something was only food if we liked its taste. I really don’t like taste of celery, but because I don’t like it doesn’t make it not food. I really do like the taste of PlayDoh, but I don’t think that makes the neon pink putty into food, just because I have weird taste buds.

The classic is ‘if a tree falls in the woods, but no one was around to hear it, did it actually make a sound?’ It’s an interesting question, and one that places individualistic humanity over and above the reality of any and all outside experiences. It’s pretty selfish, and rather me-centric, but isn’t that just like us?

When it comes to love, we have begun to say things like ‘if I didn’t feel it right, then you didn’t do it right!’ Or more commonly, ‘unless you approve of me then you can’t really love me.’ When did approval get into this game?

There is a big difference between acceptance and approval. Whereas God might accept me just as I am, he doesn’t necessarily approve of all I am. It’s completely legitimate to have acceptance without approval. I think God probably wants me to eat celery and not PlayDoh! This doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love me though.

My wife accepts me leaving my underwear on the bathroom floor, it doesn’t mean she approves of it. Helping a friend with a drug addiction needs to come with acceptance of the person, but not approval of the habit, otherwise it’s just enabling.

If I said that you can’t love me because you don’t accept me – when what I really mean is approve of me – I think I would be just a tad manipulative. I would be holding your love ransom to my subjective and emotive standard. This just isn’t fair.

What about all the feels?

The resulting subversively emerging assumption (try saying that five times faster) is that making people feel loved is exactly what we were trying to conjure up all along. Of course, it’s entirely possibly to make someone feel loved, but not actually love them at all – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s start with the goodness in this before we entirely chew the idea up and spit it out.

  • If you’re making no effort to understand the people that you are apparently loving, then are you really making an effort to love them?
  • If you’re holding people enslaved to your ideas of what they should and shouldn’t be before you love them, is it really love?
  • If you’re totally indifferent to how someone feels in response to your ‘loving’ language and or actions, then are you really sure that ‘loving’ is what you are doing?

Just saying ‘I’m loving you’ without any accountability to the person we’re loving isn’t enough. They might feel it or not feel it, but frankly we might be getting it wrong anyway.

It’s always worth taking an emotional inventory before we push too hard on the ‘but I’m misunderstood’ button. Feeling loved, after all, is at least part of what we’re hoping for when we love someone. At least it should be.

This issue goes both ways, but is the feeling the whole story? No. It’s not even on the first page.

Are we loving wrong when they don’t ‘feel it’?

If people don’t feel loved by our love, would it necessarily mean that we’re loving those people ‘wrong’, or that our love is in some way defective, damaged, or deficient? Would it be unfledged or immature?

Let’s think about this for a moment. Have you ever done a loving thing that was then unfortunately taken in the wrong way? Have you ever been genuinely loving but the one you loved took it as something other than love? If you’re a parent, I imagine you can think of all kinds of examples!

Is it loving, for instance, to make your kids eat their greens, take baths, go to school, do their homework, or turn off their xbox after fifteen straight hours of looking like a zombie? Is it loving to watch out for who they are friends with, what they’re watching on TV, or who talking to on the internet? Is it loving to sometimes tell them ‘no’ or to discipline them when they cross a line?

Are there also times when a person we’re loving just won’t remember our loving actions? Is it, for instance, loving to pick up a drunk person from the floor and get them into a taxi home if they don’t remember that you did it? What about giving money to a charity that works with street children in Guatemala. The kids might ‘feel’ loved by the direct staff workers and volunteers, but they might not feel loved by the anonymous donor.

Thinking now of this in youth ministry, is it loving to tell young people about what the Bible says, even when it flies in the teeth about what they want? Is it loving to caution them about promiscuity, drug use, lying, or disrespecting their parents? Is it loving to talk to them about sin, God’s wrath or Hell?

Of course, it matters how you do all these things, but do we really expect people will always feel loved when we love them – is that realistic of fair?

Put another way, what would happen to our relationships with these people if we kept changing what we did in order to make sure they always felt loved. Would it always be in their best interests?

What is love, really?

Many in our culture believe that love is primarily and essentially a feeling. That is its crux, basis and bottom line. Five decades of Hollywood romance has taught us this.

Love and feelings do often overlap, of course. Love can give us all of the feels! It’s a great descriptive word to use for the warm fuzzies and we often identify the feeling of ‘love’ when good things have happened. We feel love at a funeral and we feel love at a wedding – it’s an important descriptor for complicated emotions.

So, love can be descriptive, but does that make it a feeling in and of itself?

Although love can be a descriptor for a complicated set of powerful emotions, the word itself in English is historically a verb. Love is an action, it’s something that we do. Even in New Testament Greek, the four words ἀγάπη, ἔρως, φιλία, and στοργή can be both nouns and verbs, and often mean both together.

When we love someone then, we don’t simply ‘feel’ towards them with some kind spasmodic force. Feelings may accompany what we do, but they are not the whole. When we love somebody we serve them, we help them, we lift them up, we support them, we stand with them, we are present to them, and we protect them. Occasionally we might even withdraw from them.

Sometimes we lovingly do loving things for people that are best for them even if they won’t like them or recognise them as ‘love’. My wife is still trying to ‘lovingly’ make me see a dentist.

Where do ‘love languages’ feature in this?

This is a really interesting question. Gary Chapman’s ‘love languages’ books became a growing phenomenon in the Church throughout the last two decades, disseminating across Christian literature.

There’s an awful lot of important things to learn about how people give and receive love in these ideas. Understanding love languages as a part of personality types can help us communicate better with people and be more sympathetic. They are not the whole story though and need to be balanced with a much fuller philosophy of who people are and what love is.

I would strongly suggest reading about love languages but keep that in check with reading something like Don Carson’s fabulous little book, ‘The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.’

What about God?

God tells us that he disciplines those he loves. He reminds us of this exactly because often we don’t feel loved when He does (Pr. 3:12; Heb. 12:4-12). Is God’s loving discipline somehow defective? Does God need to readdress his understanding of our love languages? Of course not!

God is love after all (1 Jn. 4:7-12), and we should never accuse Him of not being so just because we didn’t ‘feel’ it at any given time.

We hope that the people we love will always feel loved – of course we do! There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between the two. However, one doesn’t guarantee the other. We can’t hold our own loving actions captive to someone else’s feelings.

If in doubt, we should do the loving thing, however it is taken.

 

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

How to pick a youth ministry training course

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Since writing my post on why you should train for ministry, I have had a couple of emails asking my opinions on various courses. With that in mind, I thought I’d write this.

There are three basic things to look out for when you visit potential training courses: Curriculum content, community support, and outside opportunities.

Curriculum content

Whatever the particular focus, each youth ministry curriculum should include these four areas. They might be labelled differently, or be mixed into various modules, but I think the core should still be there:

Theological foundation

How to handle the Bible, think theologically, and grapple with historic doctrine. There should be exegetical training, along with time spent on the fundamentals of systematic theology. This should not be reduced to only include things obviously pertinent to youth ministry. You might also want to make sure they sign up to mainstream creeds, or are members of something like the Evangelical Alliance.

Youth work theory

How does youth work interact with the disciplines of theology, psychology, history, education, sociology, and politics? Evaluation of various models, and time spent on things like contextualised mission, vision and strategy, and church integration. This should ideally include a little bit of counselling theory too.

Youth work practice

How to operate a youth ministry in safe and legal way including developing a team, managing volunteers, safeguarding, data protection, and health and safety law. How to create projects, evaluate, and change them, and how to work in tandem with the wider vision of the church. This should also include self-care, crisis response and reflective practice.

Ethics and apologetics

How to facilitate healthy conversations and manage discussions around complex areas. How to respond appropriately to the most frequently asked questions by teenagers. How to talk with nuance and subtlety, learning to think critically in an emotionally complex tapestry of personalities.

Community support

Some courses will offer you more of a community environment than others. There are three things I’d be looking for.

Spiritual engagement

Is it common practice to pray during lectures? Are there regular chapel services, prayer meetings, and compulsory student support style groups? Do students have personal tutors, and is there an emphasis on spiritual growth in those times? Are families encouraged to get involved? Are you going to grow your heart in tandem with your head? Linked with this is how accessible and open are your professors?

Student body

It’s important to look at things like age and gender spread, but also consider if there is a particular theological leaning, church background, or class type. Will your connections be superficial, or strong and lasting? On the flip side could you be too comfortable and not challenged? Is there a student union with reps, social events, and recognition by a national body? An NUS card is a wonderful thing!

Partnerships

Are they in an ivory tower, shouting at the world and never interacting with it? Who do they run events with and what projects do they share? Who else uses their buildings? Which visiting speakers do they regularly invite? Is the course actually accredited and recognised?

Outside opportunities

The best degrees are supported by relevant experience that you can get locally. The following are all ways of making sure you won’t be living in a bubble for three years.

Volunteering

Are the churches and organisations nearby that you can volunteer for beyond any official placement scheme? Can you develop your experience in a personally crafted way?

Social

Are there places like sports clubs, bars, cinemas, and gyms that you could meet non-Christians? Can you continue with your hobbies? Will you be able to let your hair down outside the confines of the course?

Employment

Is it possible for you to hold a part-time job in the area? Does the course allow for working alongside studying?

Conclusion

There’s always a X factor to these things, and you have to follow where God leading you, but I hope these three areas are a good place to start.

You can go further and delve into things like lecture delivery style, chances for further study, how epic their library is, what bursaries are available, what the accommodation and food is like, is there adequate study and social areas, the climate, and how employers view the place etc. – but I hope these three essential areas will start you on the right path.

Check out the websites, visit the colleges, and ask lots of questions. Most of all be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit and have lots of fun!

 

Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash